XRP Caught Between Divergent Institutional Bets as Ripple Clinches EU License and Goldman Exits ETFs

Goldman Sachs dumps XRP ETF holdings; Intesa Sanpaolo and Clearstream embrace XRP in Europe. Ripple gets EU license, tokenization hits $4B, but XRP price drops 41% YTD.

The story of XRP in mid-2026 is one of stark institutional cross-currents. While Ripple celebrates a regulatory milestone in Europe and tokenization on its ledger surges, Wall Street’s most prestigious investment bank has quietly liquidated its entire XRP exchange-traded fund position. The token itself trades around $1.10–$1.11, nursing a year-to-date loss of roughly 41% and down nearly 42% over twelve months.

Goldman Sachs, which in March 2026 had been the largest institutional holder of US XRP ETFs with a $153.8 million stake across four funds, disclosed in its next quarterly filing that the position had vanished entirely. The bank also sold all its Solana ETF holdings and trimmed Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF exposure, redirecting capital into crypto-equity stakes in Circle, Galaxy Digital and Coinbase — with those positions rising as much as 249%. The filing, made in mid-May, was a snapshot as of quarter-end, not a live portfolio update, and the SEC notes such disclosures are not necessarily audited. Still, the complete exit from XRP-specific products caught the community off guard, especially since Goldman still held roughly $700 million in Bitcoin ETFs after the reduction.

Yet other traditional institutions are moving in the opposite direction. Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest bank, invested $18 million in XRP via the Grayscale XRP Trust, taking its total crypto exposure to $235 million — more than double the $100 million it held at the end of 2025. This divergence underscores a fractured institutional landscape: one Wall Street titan retreats from XRP, while a European heavyweight builds exposure through the same regulated vehicles.

Ripple itself has been notching significant wins on the regulatory and infrastructure front. Clearstream, the post-trade services arm of Deutsche Börse, has formally added XRP to its regulated custody offering, giving institutional investors a direct, MiCA-compliant route to hold the token. On the same day, the Luxembourg financial regulator CSSF granted Ripple a comprehensive crypto license, enabling the company to offer services across the entire European Economic Area. In Ripple’s words, the license was a strategic milestone.

The XRP Ledger’s tokenization business is booming. The value of tokenized real-world assets on the network has reached roughly $4 billion, up from just $150 million a year ago, placing it among the top four tokenization platforms globally. Banks are testing the infrastructure in earnest: JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo recently completed a four-second treasury redemption on the ledger. Last March, Intesa Sanpaolo’s XRP purchase was itself executed as a trust investment, not a direct token buy.

Despite these fundamentals, the price remains pinned near its 52-week low. The token repeatedly failed to break above resistance at $1.14–$1.15 on July 7, and trading volume was thin. Technically, the next support lies between $1.08 and $1.10; a break below that could bring the psychological $1.01 floor into play. The 50-day moving average at $1.19 and the 200-day at $1.47 sit well above current levels, indicating the medium-term trend has not yet turned.

US spot XRP ETFs have attracted net inflows of nearly $1.5 billion over eight consecutive weeks, but that streak ended on Tuesday with a day of zero net new capital. The cumulative net assets in the funds stand at $1.045 billion. Meanwhile, XRP reserves on Binance have dropped 20% since November 2024 to 2.6 billion tokens, pushing the Binance scarcity index for XRP to a 24-month high of 0.77. The relative strength index sits at a neutral 46.8, with 30-day volatility around 38% — typical of the sideways grind traders have endured for weeks.

The Goldman Sachs exit, while a single data point, complicates the narrative of unstoppable institutional XRP adoption. That one fund snapshot can be interpreted as skepticism or simply a portfolio rebalancing — but it happened in the same quarter that Ripple secured its EU license and Clearstream opened its doors. The price, for now, reflects neither euphoria nor panic. It reflects a market waiting for a catalyst strong enough to break the $1.15 wall, or for selling pressure to push it through the $1.08 floor.